Top U.S. officials sound alarm on coming expiration of 'critical' FISA surveillance program.
In this Nov. 28, 2018, file photo, the Department of Justice seal is shown in Washington, D.C.Top U.S. officials on Tuesday began their formal efforts to sound an alarm to Congress on a surveillance program -- one they describe as "critical" to protecting national security -- that is set to expire at the end of this year.
"What keeps me up at night is thinking about what will happen if we fail to renew Section 702 of FISA," DOJ Assistant Attorney General Matt Olsen said in a speech at the Brookings Institution Tuesday. "In the 15 years since enactment, Section 702 has become the Intelligence Community’s most valuable national security legal tool. And we must retain it to confront the evolving threats we will be facing ahead.
"This authority is an invaluable tool that continues to protect Americans every day and is crucial to ensuring that U.S. defense, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies can respond to threats from the People’s Republic of China, Russia, nefarious cyber actors, terrorists, and those who seek to harm our critical infrastructure," Sullivan said.
But that program is entirely separate from the FISA program that the administration is currently appealing to Congress to reauthorize before its end of year expiration, which doesn't involve court approved warrants. In certain cases, such queries would be proper if an official was seeking to identify an American who could be considered a victim of foreign hacking or spying. But the audit found cases in which it said officials appeared to have misunderstood the rules and used the program to screen potential informants for any damaging information and one case where an agent queried the name of a local political party to see if it had connections to foreign intelligence.
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